All power to the network

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 12 April 2008 02:52

Opinion and Analysis

Networking giant Cisco is turning its attention to the consumer market, but if you think this means selling wireless access points and broadband routers for home use, think again. Cisco's ambition is for a vast range of consumer services implemented in and delivered through its technology embedded in service provider networks.

A couple of months ago Cisco announced its new high end edge router for carrier and large enterprise networks: the ASR (applications services router) 1000 series. Highlight of that announcement was the unveiling of its core processor, the Cisco-developed QuantumFlow processor: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/16864/127/ a single chip containing 40 separate processors that is the heart of the ASR 1000. The superlatives flowed thick and fast in that announcement, but not without some justification.

In essence, according to Cisco, the way the processor and the ASR1000 works is this: as each data packet enters the ASR1000 the QuantumFlow processor inspects it and according to what it has been instructed to do for the service to which that packet belongs is able to assign to one or more of its 40 processors the task of dealing with that packet accordingly.

For example: does it belong to a high-level HDTV service which means that it has to be given high priority and charged at a high rate? Is it peer-to-peer traffic trying to get through at peak times when the service provider has decided that peer-to-peer should only be allowed through at off peak? And so on and so forth.

This means that the ASR1000 is much more than an edge router. It has been designed to implement in software many functions needed at the edge of the network that normally require dedicated hardware - either separate boxes or dedicated processor cards. Functions supported include firewall, IPSec VPNs, deep-packet inspection and session border control. All these are provided, according to Cisco, through software virtualisation enabling 'instant-on' provisioning, and all are run off the QuantumFlow chip. CONTINUED